Complex behaviors and social mobilization approaches to climate action. The “Sustainable Tapas” project.
- Introduction
Nowadays, the science of climate change has plausible and accurate researches that implies different scenarios, which depend on the degree of action or inaction in the face of a climate crisis. The political, economic and societal measures implemented in the next decade will have far-reaching effects in determining these eventualities or will help to bring the importance of recognizing the effects of climate change and the necessary response to the forefront (Watts et al., 2019). Therefore, from a diffusion of behavior mechanisms and cluster network with strong ties perspective, the spread of complex behaviors on climate action is the main objective of our case study, “The Sustainable Tapas” Project.
2. The “Sustainable Brunch” Project
Adopting a plant-rich diet is one of the most effective individual actions to reduce greenhouse gases. In the Sustainable Tapas (ST) project, we applied complex contagion and social mobilization theories to influence a group of friends to adopt a plant-rich diet.
Complex contagion describes how strong-tie, clustered networks are needed to spread behaviors, and social mobilization suggests that five factors — personal, accountable, normative, identity-relevant and connected–are needed in social influence campaigns.
As a requirement of participation in a climate action fellowship with Cornell University and its Civic Ecology Lab, I conducted and implemented the ST Project, which consists of three phases:
a. Experience: Friends were invited to eat tapas prepared with local, seasonal, plant-rich ingredients; 3 events, 34 participants total.
b. “Sustainable Tapas” 15-day challenge: Incentivized participants to adopt a sustainable food behavior by awarding sustainable cuisine prizes.
c. Monitoring: Tracked participants’ number of plant-rich meals before and after the challenge to reinforce participants’ behavior.
3. Results
The most outstanding results of our project so far, are:
· Participants posted 185 social media posts with average of 115 views
· 48% of participants completed the challenge, equivalent to 117 plant rich meals
· Participant characteristics: 53% Master degree, 85% female, mean age 28 yrs, 50% Latin American, 38% European 12% North American.
· Estimated reduction of 41% in CO2 emissions compared to Spanish median CO2 emissions from food.
4. Conclusions
ST Project is a applicable initiative that can be replicate in order to tackle climate change and bring individual and community action in the transitional path to a more sustainable food behaviors; using social reinforcement within a “local network” to influence participants to adopt new eating behaviors.
ST Project is now in a new phase, where attempts to influence local network led to spillover and replicating behaviors, i.e., working with grocery stores, plant-based companies and start-ups; to promote plant-rich food items and diets.
ST Project implies a social reinforcement that would help for adopting new diet-behaviors which are also linked to health-habits. These types of behavior’s propagation depend on clustered-network structures than just simple-viral networks. For pursuing a clustered-network type is important social network member have a strong interpersonal affect, because it is highly correlated with the formation of clustered social ties.
More information:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8857223/
Written by:
Fatima Delgado. PhD.
